Current district heating systems are moving towards 4th generation district heating in which end-users play an active role in system operation. Research has shown that optimising buildings' heating demands can release network congestion and contribute to reducing primary energy usages. Coupled with end-user privacy concerns, an approach in which buildings jointly optimise their heating demands while preserving privacy needs to be investigated. In view of this need, we have developed a distributed demand response approach based on exchange ADMM to support distributed agent-based heating demand optimisation for the district heating system with minimal private information exchanges. This paper summarises mathematical derivation, simulation and implementation of the proposed approach. The results show that the proposed approach obtained the same results as its centralised counterpart proposed in the existing literature and the sensible information exchanges were substantially reduced. An implementation at multiple spatial scales and time scales on micro-controllers and a communication system validates the proposed approach in a practical context. In conclusion, the proposed approach is suitable for real-world implementation in a large-scale district heating system.

当前的区域供热系统正朝着第四代区域供热系统发展，在该系统中，最终用户在系统运行中扮演着积极的角色。研究表明，优化建筑物的供暖需求可以缓解网络拥堵并有助于减少一次能源的使用。结合最终用户的隐私问题，需要研究一种建筑物共同优化其供暖需求，同时又保留隐私的方法。考虑到这一需求，我们开发了基于交换ADMM的分布式需求响应方法，以最少的私人信息交换来支持区域供热系统的基于代理的分布式供热需求优化。本文总结了该方法的数学推导，仿真和实现。结果表明，该方法获得了与现有文献中提出的集中式方法相同的结果，并且显着减少了明智的信息交流。在微控制器和通信系统上在多个空间尺度和时间尺度上的实现在实际环境中验证了所提出的方法。总之，所提出的方法适合在大型区域供热系统中的实际应用。